Southern Register Spring 2011

the the newsletter of the

Center for the Study of Southern Culture • Spring 2011

the university of mississippi

Southern Studies 2011 Graduates and Awards

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n May the largest ever graduating class of Southern Studies students completed the program, and most gathered for lunch with family, friends, and Center faculty and staff to celebrate graduation. Like all classes of Southern Studies students, this group came into the program with wide interests and developed new fascinations and

talents. In choosing their thesis and internship projects, the graduates paid particular attention to issues of tourism, rural life, literature, foodways, music, memory, religion, and gender, and several merged written theses with Web sites, photography, and film. Three Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College students, one in Southern Studies, one in English, and

one in Sociology, won the Gray, Coterie, and Aschoff awards for their Honors theses. Papers on religion on the eve of the Civil War and organizing efforts in the civil rights movement won the Lucille and Motee Daniels Awards for the best thesis and best paper by Southern Studies graduate students. And there is so much interest and expertise in using media to do documentary work that a new prize in Documentary Media went to a student who joined a rephotography project on her home town of Frisco City, Alabama, with a Web site and short film.

Gray Award Katie Watson, “‘It was necessary that somebody do what I was doing, and I did it’: The Biography of Juanita McCown Hight”

David Wharton

Coterie Award Leslie Johns Ray, “Under the Blow Dryer: A Study of Three Fictional Beauty Shops”

2011 Southern Studies MA graduates include, left to right, front row: Meghan Leonard, Novelette Brown, Bingo Gunter; second row: Xarís Martínez, Mary Amelia Taylor, Eric Griffis; third row: Jesse Wright, Ross Brand, Tyler Keith. Not pictured: Anna Katherine Attaway, Natoria Kennell-Foster, Katharine Duvall Osteen, and Cathryn S. Stout.

Peter Aschoff Award for the best paper on Southern music Bruce O’Brian Foster, “Crank Dat Soulja Boy: Understanding Black Male Hip-Hop Aspirations in Rural Mississippi”

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This spring, summer, and fall Published Quarterly by The Center for the Study of Southern Culture The University of Mississippi Telephone: 662-915-5993 Fax: 662-915-5814 E-mail: cssc@olemiss.edu www.olemiss.edu/depts/south

IN THIS ISSUE Spring 2011 1 Southern Studies Graduates and Awards 2 Director’s Column 3 Sounds of South Radio Programs 3 Living Blues News 3 Center Staff Member and Southern Studies Alum Marry 4 Fields Inaugurates Lecture Series 4 Gammill Gallery Exhibition Schedule 5 2011 F&Y: “Faulkner’s Geographies” 6 Public Policy, Southern Studies Graduate Katie Watson 8 Center Advisory Committee 8 In Memoriam 9 Friends of the Center 10 Marshall-Linnemeier Exhibition 11 Southern Studies Musical Alums 13 Southern Studies Alumni News 16 Future of the South Symposium Report: Gulf Oil Spill after a Year 17 Reading the South: Reviews & Notes 18 The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volumes Currently Available 19 Southern Foodways Alliance News 23 Notes on Contributors 23 Mark Your Calendars!

24 2011 Delta Literary Tour Photographs 26 2011 Oxford Conference for the Book 28 Cartoonist Joyce Farmer 29 OCB Panel on “Texts and Technologies” 30 NLCF Donates Files to MDAH 31 MIAL to Celebrate Mississippi Artists and Writers on June 4 in Ocean Springs 33 Clarksdale’s Williams Festival to Feature Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 34 Southern Culture Catalog 35 Catalog Order Form 36 Address Section/Mailing List Form/ Friends Information and Form

REGISTER STAFF Editor: Ann J. Abadie Graphic Designer: Susan Bauer Lee Mailing List Manager: Mary Hartwell Howorth Editorial Assistant: Sally Cassady Lyon Lithographer: RR Donnelley Magazine Group The University complies with all applicable laws regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity in all its activities and programs and does not discriminate against anyone protected by law because of age, color, disability, national origin, race, religion, sex, or status as a veteran or disabled veteran.

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will bring some dramatic changes at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. Longtime friends are leaving or changing positions, new friends are joining us, and—as always—students are graduating. In the largest addition in many years, in the fall Southern Studies will have four new faculty members (an anthropologist, a sociologist, and two historians, including a foodways scholar).

With all of these changes, it may be a good idea to think about how Southern Studies has changed over the years. Our founders, who helped give the Center its shape and purpose back in the 1970s, made a number of important decisions that turned out to be absolutely right. First, they made sure the Center, unlike so many institutes and think tanks, became a teaching institution. Having students brings new people and ideas through the Center, it means faculty members test their ideas for relevance with today’s scholars, and it means that many students and alumni do extraordinary things as part of Southern Studies. Second, the people who set up the Center for the Study of Southern Culture established a broad and open definition of both “Southern” and “Culture,” a definition best represented by the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and its multivolume successor. A third decision, or perhaps just an inclination that became unofficial policy, helped establish that Southern Studies as an academic field has to change as academic movements, students, technology, the South, and the world all change in dramatic ways. Over the 34 years of the Center’s history, it would have been easy for somebody—a committee, or director, or group of faculty or students or staff—to try to place precise limits on what the field of Southern Studies is and is not. But the interdisciplinary nature of the field and the openness to various approaches that brings many people to Southern Studies have meant that definitions of the field can only work if they remain broad and flexible.

Over the years, Southern Studies has been involved in, among many others, the following academic pursuits.

(1) Documenting folk traditions, or cultural traditions. Several of the Center’s early faculty members studied folk tradition, folk art, and folk music, and the interest in the intersections of tradition and the coming of various forms of modernity have long been crucial to the program.

(2) Asking about distinctiveness. Investigating whether a South exists or once existed separate from national norms, this scholarship has frequently relied on maps and charts to show measurable differences and similarities between the South and other parts of the country.

(3) Analyzing identity. Studying both obvious and obscure sources, this scholarship has analyzed how people identify themselves as Southerners, who does and who does not, when, why, and to whom it matters.

(4) Studying what people love. Some people come to the studying the South in part because its writers, musicians, artists, activists, cooks, or others have something uniquely valuable to offer. While the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, Living Blues magazine, and the Southern Foodways Alliance are about studying and not simply celebrating their subjects, they often draw energy from the passions that brought people to their subjects in the first place, and the tension between appreciating and analyzing has long presented intriguing challenges.

I find that many of people outside academia, and some within it, assume that the Center’s mission revolves around some combination of those basic efforts—documenting the old, investigating distinctiveness and identity, and studying admirable cultural contributions. But those people are wrong—Southern Studies benefits from taking numerous, ever-changing, often overlapping approaches. Some of those approaches include: (5) Analyzing problems. Some of the efforts of Center faculty, students, and alumni have had the reformer’s goal of getting to know more about problems in order to envision and find solutions. continued on page 32 Spring 2011

The Southern Register

Sounds of the South Radio Programs Bring Encyclopedia Entries to Life

The Southern Register

The ninth annual Blues Today! Symposium, “Missing Chapters in Blues History,” was held at the University’s Blues Archive on February 24–25, 2011. The program featured a rare visit and performance from Natchez, Mississippi, musicians Gray Montgomery and Y. Z. Ealey on a special edition of Thacker Mountain Radio.

Held at the historic Lyric Theater on the Oxford Square, the show included sets by Alvin Youngblood Hart and Reverend John Wilkins. Keynote speaker Jim O’Neal provided an entertaining and informative look at his research for the Mississippi Blues Trail Markers, and panel discussions included a Q&A with musicians and a look at blues tourism.

Next year’s symposium is scheduled for February 16–17, 2012, so please visit www.livingblues.com for future details.

The current issue of Living Blues includes our annual Blues Festival Guide featuring a comprehensive list of this year’s blues festivals throughout the world. Features include an interview with harp player Sugar Blue and Jasper County, Mississippi’s guitar man L. C. Ulmer. The issue concludes with an excerpt from I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy, an exhaustive biography of the influential Chicago bluesman’s career.

Pick up a copy of Living Blues at bookstores or subscribe today at our Web site: www.livingblues.com. A sample issue of the magazine is available upon request via e-mail: info@livingblues.com.

Mark Camarigg

Matthew Graves

Since last fall, music entries from The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have been leaping off the page and onto the airwaves via the University of Mississippi’s Sounds of the South radio show. The show airs three times a week on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Produced by the University’s Media and Documentary Projects Center, each three-and-a-half-minute audio spot is dedicated to a particular Southern musician or location. Topics include, among many others, Jelly Roll Morton, Bascombe Lunsford, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Jimmy Reed, Protest Music, Swamp Pop, Dolly Parton, Clifton Chenier, Southern Culture on the Skids, REM, the banjo, John Coltrane, and Mose Allison.

“The clips are edited for radio from entries found in the Music volume of the Center’s New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,” show producer Jimmy Thomas said. The radio program helps showcase the scholarly endeavor of the encyclopedia by introducing it in a unique fashion to a broader audience, said Thomas, who is also publications editor at the Center and managing editor of the 24-volume encyclopedia.

“Not everyone reads encyclopedias,” he said. “The radio show helps us to reach different people in an entertaining, interesting way.”

The idea for the segments was born during conversations between Thomas and Joe York, a producer for Media and Documentary Projects. The spots combine scholarship, teaching, and outreach, according to Ted Ownby, director of the Center. “Each of the radio spots begins as an entry from the encyclopedia, but Southern Studies graduate students edit the entries a bit, adding some music to make the ideas in the programs more tangible and immediately understandable,” Ownby said.

Sounds of the South also provides students with real-world professional experience. The opportunity to help produce the radio show, particularly the technical aspects, is invaluable, said Camilla Aikin, a Southern Studies graduate student from Fairhope, Alabama. “My thesis is on the underground Southern music scene during the ’70s and ’80s,” Aikin said.

“I’m obsessed with music, always have been.”

Broadcast at 12:30 p.m. Mondays and Fridays and at 10:55 p.m. Saturdays, the show is narrated by Charles Reagan Wilson, longtime professor of history and Southern Studies and former Center director. The program helps generate greater cultural awareness of the South’s musical achievements, he said. “Never in my career did I dream that I would one day be in radio. It’s a lot of fun.”

For more information on the Center, go to www.olemiss. edu/depts/south.

Tobie Baker

Living Blues News

Mark Camarigg, managing editor of Living Blues, and Southern Studies alum Rebecca Batey (MA 2009) at their wedding on May 7, 2011, in Memphis

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Barbara Fields Inaugurates Gilder-Jordan Lecture Series Amber Helsel

Barbara Fields, professor of history at Columbia University, presented “Racecraft and the History of the South” as the inaugural Gilder-Jordan Lecture at the University of Mississippi on March 8, 2011. Fields is author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the 19th Century and coauthor or coeditor of Slaves No More, Free At Last, and Freedom: The Documentary History of Emancipation. In 1982 she contributed the essay “Ideology and Race in American History” to a volume honoring C. Vann Woodward, director of her doctoral dissertation at Yale University.

In that often-assigned and influential essay, along with other work, Fields has analyzed the meanings of race as “a purely ideological notion.”

Fields began her Gilder-Jordan lecture by asking the audience to try to distinguish between race and racism as two separate concepts. “Some people consider race and racism as interchangeable, which is a mistake,” Fields said. She examines the ways that assumptions about

Barbara Fields racial difference become part of our social culture, which happens through a process she calls “racecraft.”

Fields illustrated racecraft by telling the story of a New York police officer who accidentally killed another police officer who was off duty. The victim happened to be black and armed, and the first police officer acted on impulse. “For a split second that police officer thought his fellow officer must be a criminal because he saw an armed,

Exhibition Schedule April 4–June 20, 2011 Southern Work, Southern Play Southern Studies Documentary Students June 22–August 19, 2011 Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain Martin J. Dain August 23–October 14, 2011 Southern Crossings: Where Geography and Photography Meet David Zurick The Gammill Gallery, located in Barnard Observatory, is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., except for University holidays.

Telephone: 662-915-5993.

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Spring 2011

African American man,” Fields said.

“It wasn’t the man’s race that killed the man, but the racism of his fellow officer.

Racecraft is the process that makes racism invisible to people.” She said that racism was invisible in this particular case because the man did not evaluate his actions before doing them.

Fields also suggested that the concept of racecraft was present at the founding of the country. The Constitution is a representation of democratic principles, but a segment from the infamous three-fifths clause suggests otherwise. “This clause talks about slaves without actually using the term,” Fields said. “The presence of slavery in our country defined freedom for those who actually had freedom.

But it limited the scope of democracy for those who did not share these [liberties].

Fields argued that people have become susceptible to the structure of inequalities. This susceptibility, she said, has been created by racecraft, which creates an illusion that race is permanent.

“What we need to do is use every device we can to estrange ourselves from the familiarity of the racecraft dynamic,” Fields said. “Otherwise we will just stumble around it forever.”

The Gilder-Jordan lecture series honors the support of Richard Gilder and Lou and Dan Jordan. Richard Gilder is a prominent philanthropist who has supported the study of American history through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and other organizations. Good friends of Richard Gilder and his wife, Lois Chiles, Lou and Dan Jordan are University of Mississippi alumni with degrees in history. Dan Jordan served for years as the president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Gilder-Jordan Lecture series is organized through the Center, African American Studies, the History Department, and the Center for Civil War Research.

Molly Dyal The Southern Register

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Faulkner’s Geographies/Southern Literary Geographies

When telling William Faulkner “you have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn” and the place for him could only be “that little patch up there in Mississippi,” Sherwood Anderson clearly anticipated what would indeed become the lodestone of Faulkner’s fiction. But as things turned out, and as a new group of readers have brought to our attention, Faulkner’s fiction expanded considerably, eventually implying and incorporating geographical space and geographical complexity that spread far beyond the real Lafayette and the mythical Yoknapatawpha counties. More than that, those new spaces and complexities returned to their beginnings in such a way as to heighten awareness of the extent to which Faulkner’s “postage stamp of native soil” was itself the mirror of worlds well beyond its immediate boundaries.

“Faulkner’s Geographies,” the topic for the 38th annual Faulkner and Yoknaptawpha Conference, will explore for five days of lectures, panels, tours, and “Teaching Faulkner” sessions the ramifications of a fiction that joins the North Mississippi world of Yoknapatawpha with the West Indies and Latin America, as well as with the metropolises of New Orleans, New York, and Hollywood. Among the rewards of such exploration is the recognition of how borders function as barriers to or catalysts for communication, how movement between spaces can appear as migration or exile, how peoples repeat their original spaces within new ones, or transform themselves into the new inhabitants of a new world.

Papers and panel presentations will range as far as geography can take them, addressing such topics as Faulkner’s French Quarter Circle in the 1920s, Absalom, Absalom! and the geographies of Martinique, Faulkner and the cosmopolitan Black South, Faulkner as State ambassador, Faulkner’s women wanderers, and Jamestown, jimson-weed, and The Sound and the Fury.

At the opening reception of the conThe Southern Register

July 17–21, 2011

John Shelton Reed ference the University Museum will sponsor a special exhibition of photographs from the Dain and Cofield collections of the University Library as well as photographs of Faulkner by Henri Cartier-Bresson recently acquired by the University Museum.

In addition to invited scholars and critics mentioned in a previous article, presenters will include John Shelton Reed, the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and 13 speakers selected from the conference “Call for Papers” competition: Eric Bledsoe, Florida State University; Benjamin Child, University of Mississippi; Kita Douglas, University of Victoria; Peter Froehlich, Penn State University, Hazelton; Lorie Fulton, William Carey University; Ryan Heryford, University of California, San Diego; Lisa Klarr, Duke University; Patrick Mooney, University of California, Santa Barbara; Scott Ortolano, Florida State University;

Jenna Sciuto, Northeastern University; Stefan Solomon, University of New South Wales; Erin Sweeney, University of California, Irvine; and Bart Welling, University of North Florida.

There will also be a panel with four of the curators and assistant curators of Rowan Oak giving their perspectives on perhaps the most famous literary home in the United States; sessions on “Teaching Faulkner” conducted by James Carothers, University of Kansas, Charles Peek, Emeritus University of Nebraska at Kearney, Terrell Tebbetts, Lyon College, and Theresa Towner, University of Texas at Dallas; a discussion of “Collecting Faulkner” by Seth Berner; a display by the University Press of Mississippi of Faulkner books published by university presses throughout the United States, as well as a display, with books for sale, by Seth Berner. There will also be guided daylong tours of North Mississippi, the Delta, and Memphis; a picnic served at Rowan Oak; and “Faulkner on the Fringe”—an “open mike” evening at the Southside Gallery.

Discount rates for the conference are available for groups of five or more students. Inexpensive dormitory housing is available for all registrants. Contact Robert Fox at rfox@olemiss.edu for details. There are also a limited number of waivers of registration for graduate students. Contact Donald Kartiganer at dkartiga@olemiss.edu.

Further information on the program, registration, course credit, accommodations, and travel can be found on the conference Web site: www.outreach. olemiss.edu/events/faulkner.

Donald M. Kartiganer

SOUTHERN WRITERS, SOUTHERN WRITING GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE The 17th Annual Southern Writers, Southern Writing Graduate Conference is set for July 14–16, 2011, at the University of Mississippi. Both critical and creative pieces will be presented, dealing with all aspects of Southern culture. Topics for the conference are not limited to literary studies—we are interested in all interdisciplinary approaches to Southern culture. Martyn Bone, University of Mississippi, will give the plenary lecture. Contact Kyle Schlett at swswgradconference@gmail. com for more information.

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Public Policy, Southern Studies Graduate Plans Service Career in Nonprofit Sector

Rebecca Lauck Cleary Page 6

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Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for the best paper in Southern Studies Eva Walton, “If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The Mississippi Movements of Fannie Lou Hamer and Marjorie R. Baroni”

Kevin Bain

Lucille and Motee Daniels Award for best MA thesis in Southern Studies Xarís Martínez, “Minds in Place: Thornwell, Palmer, Dabney, and Breckinridge in Fast Day Sermons: Or, The Pulpit on the State of the Country (1861)” Documentary Media Award Mary Amelia Taylor, for her Web site and film associated with her MA thesis, “‘Can’t You See the Sun’s Settin’ Down on Our Town?’: Decline, Space, and Community in Frisco City, Alabama”

David Wharton

Katie Watson is known as the “travKatie Watson el agent” among her friends. As a University of Mississippi student, she has traveled frequently, including two trips abroad. But her true passion lies much closer to home. The Louisville, Mississippi, native, who in May received a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in public policy leadership and Southern Studies, will soon head to Arlington, Virginia, to work for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Watson plans to work four days a week, then take classes in nonprofit management training on Fridays.

The honors student said her career at Ole Miss has prepared her well for the challenges ahead. As a freshman, she was chosen for a Lott Leadership Scholarship, awarded to exceptional students based on their leadership ability, academic performance, and record of community service. “Public policy leadership was the major that I declared at first, because I was always interested in politics and governing,” she said. A class during her second semester quickly narrowed her focus. “I was taking a Southern Studies class with Professor Katie McKee, and I think about three weeks in, I knew I wanted to declare it as my second major,” Watson said. “That just speaks to how interesting her teaching is, and the quality of the program. It’s always been my ‘fun’ major, but it has turned into more than that. I love it; it’s a great program, and I think I’ve developed a passion for writing through it.”

Watson’s curiosity is one of her greatest strengths as a student, said McKee, McMullan Associate Professor of Southern Studies and associate professor of English. “Katie always wants to know more, and she recognizes that increasing her knowledge leads her to ask more questions,” McKee said. “She is one of the few undergraduate students I have known who is completely comfortable doing original, archival research, digging without a map for clues. The pairing of her Southern Studies major and her public policy leadership major is a perfect example of her desire to know more about the place that she comes from and about the complexities of life in that place, not just historically, but today, and with an eye toward involving herself in the region’s future.”

Watson was also a member of the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, which is how her “travel agent” nickname came about. During her Freshman Ventures trip, she went to Denver with four classmates. “As the group leader, I took the helm and planned the trip and booked the travel. It was great exposure,” Watson said. She continued her travel in summer 2008, when she studied abroad at Konkuk University in South Korea, and last summer when she went to Germany.

Watson received the Gray Award in Southern Studies for her Honors College thesis directed by Professor Elizabeth A. Payne, who teaches history. Watson’s honors include the Taylor Medal and membership in Phi Beta Kappa.

Graduates

Eric Griffis admiring Barnard Observatory Christmas ornament, given as a gift to all MA graduates. Meghan Leonard and Novelette Brown in the background.

The Southern Register

Sally Cassady Lyon

MA DEGREES IN SOUTHERN STUDIES Completed December 2010 Jesse Wright, “The Crescent and the Cross: Muslim Influence in African American Quilts” Completed Spring 2011 Anna Katherine Walraven Attaway, “Vagina Dentata and the Glorified South in Tennessee Williams” Mary Amelia Taylor, a new Southern Studies MA graduate and first-ever winner of the Documentary Media Prize, peeks around during the the 2011 class photo on the steps of Barnard Observatory.

Novelette L. Brown, “Starved: Examining Food Deserts in the Mississippi Delta” Eric Griffis, Internship, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Jennifer Holman Gunter, “‘Well, I’ll Be’: A Study of Popular Representations of Southern Women in Response to Feminism, 1970–2000”

2011 MA graduate Tyler Keith (left) and Center Director Ted Ownby fill up their plates at the graduation luncheon. Over 70 friends and family of BA and MA graduates celebrated at the Center following the commencement ceremony on May 14.

Tyler Dawson Keith, “Frontier Identity in Cultural Events of Holmes County, Florida”

Meghan Leonard, Internship, Oxford Convention and Visitors Bureau

Katharine Duvall Osteen, “The Blues Is Alright: Blues Music as a Root of Cultural Tourism and Public History” Cathryn S. Stout, “A Place of Happy Retreat: Benefitting Locals and Visitors through Sustainable Tourism Practices at Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum” Mary Amelia Taylor, “‘Can’t You See the Sun’s Settin’ Down on Our Town?’: Decline, Space, and Community in Frisco City, Alabama”

The Southern Register

Sally Cassady Lyon

Xarís Martínez, “Minds in Place: Thornwell, Palmer, Dabney, and Breckinridge in Fast Day Sermons: Or, The Pulpit on the State of the Country (1861)”

Sally Cassady Lyon

Natoria Kennell-Foster, Internship, After School Education Program, Burns Methodist Church, Oxford

Southern Studies alumnus Maarten Zwiers (2008) and new MA graduate Xarís Martínez (right) celebrate at the graduation luncheon.

Martínez, the 2011 winner of the Daniels Award for the best master’s thesis, will be continuing her studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the fall.

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Center Advisory Committee The Center’s Advisory Committee has made some important changes. After several years of hard work as the CAC Chair, Michelle Hyver Oakes has resigned her position as part of her move to Denver. According to Ted Ownby, “Michelle has done an extraordinary job supporting the Center’s efforts and helping to reshape the Advisory Committee, always dealing with issues with both hard work and good humor.

I have always enjoyed working with Michelle. We’ll miss her energy and commitment, and we wish her the best in Colorado.”

Ron Feder was elected new chair of the Center Advisory Committee.

Residents of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Ron and his wife, Becky, are well known in Mississippi cultural circles through

Mary McKenzie Thompson

William Dunlap

Randy Fertel

W. Ralph Eubanks

the work of the R&B Feder Charitable Foundation for the Beaux Arts, which helps support, among many other things, the Oxford Conference for the Book, the Southern Foodways Symposium,

the Oxford Film Festival, and Thacker Mountain Radio. Ron brings to his new position a lawyer’s experience, numerous deep connections to the Center and the University of Mississippi, and a love of music, film, and all the arts.

The CAC has added five new members in the past year: Julia Grimes of Fulton, Mississippi, W. Ralph Eubanks of Washington, D.C., Randy Fertel of New Orleans and New York City, Mary Thompson of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Bill Dunlap of Annandale, Virginia, and Coral Gables, Florida. Eubanks and Dunlap have been on recent programs of the Oxford Conference for the Book, Fertel has supported the efforts of SFA films, and all five have been involved in Center life in a variety of ways. “We’re looking forward to working with Ron Feder and the new Committee members,” said Ownby. “They help us with their talents and ideas and connections, and we appreciate how hard they work for the Center.”

In Memoriam

Constantine (Gus) George Koutroulakis Birmingham, Alabama 1929–2011

Jessie Poesch New Orleans, Louisiana May 19, 1922–April 23, 2011

Gwendolyn Magee Jackson, Mississippi 1943–2011

Reynolds Price Durham, North Carolina February 1, 1933–January 20, 2011

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The Southern Register

Friends of the Center Meghan Leonard

Why should one become a Friend of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, or renew one’s membership in the Friends program? A quick summary of two weeks in February might answer those questions.

On Thursday, February 10, documentary film maker Les Blank arrived in town to participate in the Oxford Film Festival, appear on Thacker Mountain Radio, and talk to students interested in Southern Studies and documentary film. Snow forced a cancellation of Blank’s appearance in David Wharton’s Honors 102 class, but the rest of the events, including the Thacker Mountain discussion with SST graduate student Jake Fussell, went well, and film fans got to see and discuss three of Blank’s films.

Friday night, February 11, at the Oxford Film Festival, SST alumnus and Media and Documentary Projects filmmaker Joe York debuted Mississippi Innocence, the project he and Innocence Project director Tucker Carrington have prepared about the use of DNA evidence to secure the release of two Mississippi men convicted of murder. On Saturday, the Film Festival showed York’s SFA film Smokes and Ears and debuted Brown Family Dairy, a documentary film Eric Griffis, Tyler Keith, and Meghan Leonard made as part of David Wharton and Andy Harper’s SST 534 class.

Also on Saturday, Katie McKee and

Les Blank (left) and Jake Fussell

Deborah Barker signed copies of their new collection of essays, American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary.

They were joined at the Off Square Books signing by volume authors Jay Watson and Leigh Ann Duck, both colleagues in the English Department.

Later that week, SST student Ross Brand gave the Brown Bag talk “We Listen to Whatever We Want: Nontraditional Music in the South,” based on his master’s thesis.

On the morning of February 17, in Southern Studies 102, musicians Ginny

Hawker and Tracy Schwarz gave a presentation, cosponsored by the English Department, before going on to perform on Thacker Mountain Radio. On the same day, SFA oral historian Amy Evans Streeter spoke at the Union County Historical Society. That afternoon, a band of Southern Studies faculty and students headed to Atlanta for the Southern American Studies Association meeting, where students Ross Brand, Kari Edwards, and Cathryn Stout gave papers, Charles Reagan Wilson delivered a keynote address, and Katie McKee participated in a Mark Yacovone

Meghan Leonard (left) and Tyler Keith are interviewed during the Oxford Film Festival.

The Southern Register

Spring 2011

Tracy Schwarz performing at Thacker Mountain Radio Page 9

Ivo Kamps

From left: Deborah Barker, Katie McKee, Jay Watson, and Leigh Ann Duck with Square Books manager Lyn Roberts at signing for American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

panel about interdisciplinary study with several colleagues in the University’s Global South study group.

The following week, photographer Robert Stone was on campus to visit Southern Studies classes and to discuss his exhibition Florida Cowboys, which was on display at the Gammill Gallery. The Center was one of several University groups helping to sponsor a showing of Prom Night in Mississippi, which featured a discussion with the filmmakers. Ted Ownby headed to the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration to deliver a paper on Southern sports and Faulkner’s “The Bear” while Mark Camarigg, Adam Gussow, Scott Barretta, and some student volunteers working for Living Blues welcomed guests for the Blues Today Symposium held on February 24–26. On the following Monday, MA student Mary Amelia Taylor presented a paper about the work of author Augusta Jane Wilson at the Sarah Isom Student Gender Conference.

While all this was going on, Ann Abadie was finishing preparations for the Oxford Conference for the Book; SFA staff members were completing work for two Potlikker Film Festivals in South Carolina, one in Charleston in March and the other in Greenville in April; Jimmy Thomas and Charles Wilson prepared to send a new volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture to UNC Press; Wilson, Thomas, York, and graduate student Camilla Aikin recorded several more spots in the Sounds of the South radio series; Zandria Robinson and David Wharton were working hard on a search committee for a new Southern Studies faculty member; and, of course, faculty members and students were busy with classes, papers, and theses.

Why should people become Friends, or renew their memberships as Friends? First, all of this activity revolves around teaching and scholarship. Second, it shows the Center’s broad conception of culture—film, music, literature, law, race, sports, photography, foodways, violence, religion, cowboys. Third, it shows how the Center’s work is collaborative.

In these two weeks, Center personnel worked in partnerships with at least a dozen groups, on and off campus. Fourth, the activities of the Center attract individuals who always seem to be doing something new and creative. Support from the Friends program funds, among other things, guests who visit, faculty and staff who do research and present their scholarship, partnership efforts with numerous groups, the work of professional and student film makers, and, always, students who need scholarships and assistantships. Thanks for helping.

SST Alum Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier’s Exhibition on Enslaved People and Emory University A major work of public art, honoring enslaved people intertwined with the history of Emory University, was unveiled on the original campus of Emory on February 6, 2011.

Emory celebrates its 175th anniversary in 2011 and hosted the conference “Slavery and the University: History and Legacies” February 3–6, 2011. As Emory publicly exLynn presses its “regret” for its “enMarshall-Linnemeier twinement with the institution of slavery,” this project will remember the story of Catherine Boyd, also known as Miss Kitty, an enslaved woman owned by a prominent Methodist bishop, James Osgood Andrew, first president of the Emory Board of Trustees.

Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier’s work weaves together the varied histories of Emory while unraveling myths of race, identity, and entitlement in the South. The public installation of Unraveling Miss Kitty’s Cloak brought together the descendants of Catherine Boyd and Bishop James Osgood Andrew as well as other ancestors from this small Southern community to remember those gone before.

Catherine Boyd In developing the exhibition, Marshall-Linnemeier worked closely with the Oxford-Covington African American community of Newton County, Georgia, and with cultural anthropologist Mark Auslander, who has extensively researched Emory University’s historical connections with slavery.

Marshall-Linnemeier, a renowned photo-based mixed media artist, received a BFA in photography from the Atlanta College of Art in 1990 and an MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi in 2005. For more information, visit www. linnlinn.net.

Ted Ownby Page 10

Spring 2011

The Southern Register

Southern Studies Musical Alums Understanding the rhythm of the South is a mighty work that lures many souls. From the innocence of a folk song that captures childhood in rural America to the gritty blues juke joints that helped birth rock ’n’ roll, there are complex and compelling strands intertwined in each beat, and Southern Studies alumni Caroline Herring, Dent May, and Preston Lauterbach have made it their life’s work to capture and document the song of the South in ways that a Disney movie never could. Below, the three share details about their latest projects and describe how they are enriching the world’s understanding of Southern music.

Dent May It took only two weeks in a trailer in Taylor, Mississippi, and the help of a friend for Dent May to create his 2009 debut album, The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele. When May, 25, releases his second album in late 2011 or early 2012 it will be a departure from the express recording style and ukulele-laden sound that characterized his freshman record. “I’ve grown to hate the ukulele, but the first album allowed me to travel all over the world playing music,” he said candidly. “My first album was recorded mostly with acoustic instruments. Now I’m combining a lot of electronic instruments like drum machines, synths, and samplers

Caroline Herring Caroline Herring Folk singer/songwriter Caroline Herring’s first children’s CD, The Little House Songs, was a whimsical project of love. Herring, a native of Canton, Mississippi, who graduated from the University of Mississippi’s Southern Studies Program in 1998, released the children’s record in April 2011. She based the music on the book The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton.

“I loved the book as a child, and my daughter loved it, too,” Herring said. “We read it at least 100 times. I wrote the music in one hour, and we recorded it in four. That is the main difference as it usually takes me days and days to record, and years and years to write. This children’s project was pure whimsy for me.”

While at the University of Mississippi, Herring studied Southern folklore, religion, and history, and she ties it all into her music. Those literary strands are evident in her 2009 albums Golden Apples of the Sun and Silver Apples of the Moon, which are the last two lines in the poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by William Butler Yeats.

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Herring, who currently lives in Decatur, Georgia, got her start in Oxford and on the Austin, Texas, music scene. In 2001 she released her debut album, Twilight, and her album Lantana earned a nod from National Public Radio as one of the Top Ten Best Folk Albums for 2008.

Herring, described as a folk singer with tinges of the blues mixed in, infuses her Southern roots into her performances and relishes being from the South. “People from all over the U.S.A. are thrilled to meet such an exotic creature,” she said jokingly. “No one thinks I play the blues, though; in fact, quite the opposite.” She further explained that while playing at the Newport Folk Festival in 2002, she was described by an author as looking “perplexed” as another musician performed a song by Mississippi bluesman John Hurt.

“The author says that I looked dumbfounded and perplexed when the elderly white bluesman sitting next to me played a Mississippi John Hurt song about a chicken, as if I didn’t know who Mississippi John Hurt was!” Herring explained. “In reality, I probably did look perplexed, because I remember the moment, and I was mildly irritated that some nondescript bluesman at the Newport Folk Festival, looking out at the yachts, thought he could ever understand or represent Mississippi John Hurt in any way.”

Dent May

Spring 2011

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with acoustic instruments like guitars, horns, piano, and tons of vocal parts.”

So how did May, who received his undergraduate degree in English and Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi in 2007, end up becoming a musician of a sound he calls “homemade pop music”? The artist’s quest for independence and autonomy fueled his career choice. “I was studying film at NYU, and at the time, I just needed a huge change,” May explained. “I played music since I was really young, so it felt a lot more natural than making movies. Making a movie is such a task. It’s super collaborative, while the process of making music feels more personal to me.”

So, he left film school after three semesters and enrolled in the Southern Studies Program. “When I graduated high school, I wanted to get as far away from the South as possible, so when I moved back to do Southern Studies, it had a lot to do with understanding my own relationship with my home,” he said.

May, a Jackson, Mississippi, native, said he does not consider himself a Southern musician. He said the only Southern music he liked growing up was by rappers Three 6 Mafia, Dungeon Family, and Cash Money. He calls contemporary hip-hop and R&B “the most sonically adventurous music being made right now. The rest is mostly generic blues-rock played by aging white dudes for tourists these days,” he said.

“My music is homemade pop music. I basically sit in my room and stack parts on top of each other one by one.”

May will get another chance to showcase his homemade sound to the world in May 2011 when he performs at the ATP Festival in Minehead, United Kingdom. The New York– based experimental rock band Animal Collective will curate the festival.

Even though his second album will be released on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, he and other musician friends are looking forward to making noise with their own label, Cats Purring Records. It is a collective of Mississippi musicians including Bass Drum of Death, Dead Gaze, Flight, and May. “I’m really interested in promoting any sort of creativity in Mississippi beyond my own music,” said May.

Preston Lauterbach When Preston Lauterbach enlisted help from Saxton Kari for his book about the Chitlin’ Circuit, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock and Roll, he formed a bond that was so deep that he named his son after the musician/big-band orchestra leader. “Sax died in 2009, and I named my son, who was born in 2010, after him: Isaac Saxton. Only later did I learn that Sax had made that name up!” Lauterbach said. What is not made up is Lauterbach’s passion for music.

Lauterbach, who received his master’s degree in 2003 from the Southern Studies Program, said it was the blues that led him to the program. “I came to Southern Studies because of the connections to the Blues Archive and Living Blues magazine, and the chance to study the music and culture up close,” said Lauterbach. “It was everything I had hoped. I’d never interviewed anyone before, and I hadn’t done much archive digging, but I did a lot of both through the Center, and I use those tools every day now.”

Lauterbach, 36, is a music journalist who currently lives in Memphis with his family. For years, he talked about writing a Page 12

Preston Lauterbach book on the Chitlin’ Circuit. “Well I didn’t know what the Chitlin’ Circuit was when I got to the program in 2001, but eventually I met a performer named Bobby Rush, who refers to himself as the King of the Chitlin’ Circuit. And in tailing him and interviewing him, and seeing the world he works in, I became fascinated with the circuit. It’s often mentioned and referred to, but I couldn’t find anything in print about its origins,” he said.

A friend introduced him to Saxton Kari, who said he worked for the man who invented the circuit, Denver D. Ferguson.

“Sax was really the Rosetta Stone as far as this project is concerned,” Lauterbach said. “He unlocked the secret of the circuit’s beginnings for me.”

Lauterbach explained that in his book he explores the history of the Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of juke joints where black musicians like James Brown got their start, and how these musicians spawned the birth of rock ’n’ roll. “The birth of rock ’n’ roll happened through a process that is laid out in the book and emerges there the way I think it did in reality, through a series of economic and cultural trends, plus the right combination of powerful business people and innovative artists all across the map,” he said. The “complicated history of the birth of rock and roll” is part of black America, but its history is a complex tale that still has not found its voice. “I think that’s why the story of rock ’n’ roll unfolding in black America hasn’t been told—it’s complex, and people prefer a single bullet theory to a magic bullet theory. Elvis invented rock ’n’ roll, or Fats Domino, or it was born in one place, like Memphis, but the truth is much more complicated,” he added.

Cathryn Stout

Spring 2011

The Southern Register

Southern Studies Alums Southern Studies alumni continue to do impressive and intriguing things with their degrees. Continuing a long tradition of Southern Studies student and alumni involvement in Thacker Mountain Radio, Ferriday McClatchy (MA 2010) and current student Kathryn McGaw work as producers of the radio show. Laughlin Fields (BA 2003) is the director of the H. C. Porter Gallery in Vicksburg. Media and Documentary Projects filmmaker Joe York (MA 2007) cannot stop winning awards. Mississippi Innocence, the film he directed and coproduced with Tucker Carrington of the Innocence Project, won the audience award at the Oxford Film Festival and then won the Transformative Award at the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson. York also presented two films he made with the Southern Foodways Alliance as part of a panel on “Living, Working and Eating” this April at the 2011 Future of the South Symposium, “The Gulf Oil Spill after One Year.”

Among academics, there is at least one Southern Studies alumna with a new PhD—Brooke Butler (MA 2004), whose Cultural Studies dissertation at the University of California, Davis, analyzes voodoo and its relationship to cultural tourism in New Orleans. Rob Hawkins (MA 2005), who is completing his dissertation in American Studies at St. Louis University on work and gender among itinerant black musicians, has accepted a faculty position at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. This year Robin Morris (MA 2001), who teaches history at Agnes Scott College, will complete her Yale University dissertation on the history of women and conservative politics in mid-20thcentury Georgia. In February, Peter Slade (MA 1999), who teaches religious studies at Ashland College in Ohio, delivered a series of lectures based on themes in his first book, Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship, at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Environmental scholar Bert Way (MA 1999) is spending the spring semester doing research as part of a fellowship at the Smithsonian. Xarís Martínez (MA 2011) is spending part of the summer working with the Oregon Extension Women’s Studies Program, and 2010 graduate I’Nasah Crockett will spend part of the summer in New Orleans at the Urban Bush Women’s Summer Leadership Institute.

Renna Tuten (MA 2006) is moving into a new position as coordinator of Archival Reference at the University of Georgia Special Collections Building. She will work with all three special collections departments, the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, and the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection. Nash Molpus Crews (MA 2004) works as associate director at the Cowen Institute for Public Policy Initiatives at Tulane University.

Here in Oxford, Jesse Wright (MA 2011) has a new position working in communications for the Robert C. Khayat Law Center. Current student Nell Knox will soon begin an internship with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson.

Among many developments among alumni in foodways, Cale Nicholson (MA 2009) has taken a new position as a The Southern Register

Ferriday McClatchy, Kathryn McGaw, Duff Dorrough, and Isabel Wilkerson at Thacker Mountain Radio Garden Program Specialist with the Delta Garden Program in Marshall, Arkansas. Georgeanna Chapman (MA 2008) coordinates the Fellowship of Farmers, Artisans, and Chefs that meet annually at Blackberry Farm, and she has been hired to create a traveling exhibition about the life of Craig Claiborne.

Amy Wood (MA 1995) is the editor of the forthcoming Violence volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

In another example of overlap between Center projects and Center alumni, NESC managing editor Jimmy Thomas (MA 2007) was recently interviewed by Mary Margaret Miller (MA 2007) on the Mississippi Arts Hour program on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Amy Evans Streeter (MA 2003) was the subject of an interview by Malcolm White on the same program. Eric Feldman (MA 2010) continues his work as producer of the Highway 61 radio program, and Steve Cheseborough (MA 1999), Mark Coltrain (MA 2007), and current students Melanie Young, Erik Watson, and Amy Ulmer have published reviews in recent issues of Living Blues. Taking alumni connection to the Center to a new level, Rebecca Batey (MA 2009) and Living Blues publication manager Mark Camarigg were married on May 7.

Spring 2011

Ted Ownby Page 13

Future of the South Program Covers “The Gulf Oil Spill after One Year”

Page 14

Thomas Dardar Jr., Principal Chief, United Houma Nation, Houma, Louisiana

spill, and Kolker detailed the effects of the oil spill as part of a broader process of wetlands loss. Both emphasized that such research takes time and has to be convincing and thorough to be useful.

Stephanie Showalter of the University of Mississippi’s National Sea Grant Law Center discussed the issues of land ownership, the BP oil settlement, and ongoing issues of relationship to land that continues to change its shape and nature.

On Saturday morning’s session on working, living, and eating, Chief Thomas Dardar of the United Houma Nation in Louisiana discussed the significance of fishing and oil work for the Houma, emphasizing that, like other coastal people, the Houma were still dealing with the effects of Hurricane Katrina when they had to deal with the oil spill. Based on her documentary work in south Louisiana, Nicholls State scholar Shana Walton discussed how many people along the Gulf Coast identify with the oil industry and see problems as having to do more with government than with the oil industry itself. Media and Documentary Projects filmmaker Joe York showed two of his works, a short film on the Blessing of the Spring 2011

Tammy Greer

Scholars, activists, journalists, and community leaders gathered at the Center April 1 and 2 for the Future of the South Symposium to discuss “The Gulf Oil Spill after One Year.”

The program began as a large crowd watched David Hammer of the New Orleans Times-Picayune detail, with some startling visual sources, the latest news on the precise reasons for the oil spill and the best current information about the amount of oil spilled and where it traveled. Mac McClelland of Mother Jones and Steve Lerner of Commonweal discussed their efforts to tell the stories of the oil spill in the larger contexts of stories of people whose lives are usually outside the view of the public and who often suffer the greatest extent of the health and economic damage from disasters. Karen Nelson of the Biloxi Sun Herald told stories of reporting news that people in positions of authority did not want told. All encouraged the students who had jammed the Barnard Observatory Tupelo Room to question established points of view.

Next, in a session on working, living, and eating, Louis Kyriakoudes of the University of Southern Mississippi and Liz Williams of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans described issues of labor and food safety.

Both are involved in oral history projects documenting lives affected by the spill. Author and photographer Ellis Anderson described her own frustrations of writing and living with the spill on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Louisiana musician-activist Drew Landry, well known for his song “BP Blues,” talked about the experience of people who fish and work on oil rigs in the Gulf, emphasizing issues of justice and health.

On Saturday, scientists Kristine Willett of the University of Mississippi Pharmacology Department and Alex Kolker of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Tulane University described the process of doing scientific research. Willett emphasized toxicological responses to the oil

Fleet, shot just a few days after the oil spill, and a longer film on Vietnamese fishermen in Mississippi.

In the concluding session, “Perspectives on Recovery,” Mike Webb of the University of Southern Mississippi detailed a number of the ongoing economic ramifications of the oil spill, discussing both the loss of many jobs and the addition of others. Maria Lya Ramos added a global perspective from her experience as an activist working with indigenous people in Ecuador who have dealt for years with the effects of a major oil spill by Chevron. Craig Colten wrapped up the event with a broad discussion of both the initial fascination with the oil spill, which he termed “disaster porn,” and, more recently, the national tendency to lose interest in the complexities of long-term recovery.

As listener and conference organizer, Ted Ownby offered a short summary of what he and other audience members heard from the presentations: (1) The Oil Spill is an ongoing story. (2) People should question official perspectives that come from corporate, government, or other sources. (3) We should listen to a wide range of stories, including those of people with few resources and little apparent power. (4) Along with issues of the environment, livelihood, and food, we should pay attention to issues of health. (5) Scientific research is complex, expensive, time consuming, and essential. (6) The legal and political systems are crucial in any discussions of the future of the Gulf.

(7) Discussions of what to do next may need to include not simply recovering but also reenvisioning the future.

The range of expertise at the conference, and the passions of the participants, made for an exciting event.

The conference ended with a short film on the efforts of activist Cheri Foytlin to walk from the Gulf Coast to Washington to publicize and discuss issues of justice and human welfare in response to the oil spill.

The Southern Register

Reading the South Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi.

By Dean Faulkner Wells.

New York: Crown Publishers, 2011. 272 pages. $25.00 cloth.

For those who think there is not possibly anything more that can be said about William Faulkner—his life or his work—Dean Faulkner Wells’s autobiography, Every Day by the Sun, offers an informed, insightful rejoinder. The daughter of Dean Faulkner, William Faulkner’s youngest brother who died in a plane crash in 1935, Wells became the legal ward of the famous author and spent much of her childhood, youth, and early adulthood within the Faulkner family circle in Oxford. Thus she brings an insider’s perspective to her portrait of the great writer who has been called “the American Shakespeare.” Predictably, her Faulkner is significantly different from the one portrayed either in the several Faulkner biographies that have been published or by the entertaining Faulkner tales that so frequently get confused with actual fact.

For Wells, as for the rest of us, Faulkner is a world-renowned author and the fascinating, sometimes eccentric figure who inspires popular myths; but for her he is also the loving, caring head of the Faulkner family. As such, he provided leadership, fatherly and financial support, counsel, and personal encouragement to those within his circle of responsibility; and Wells describes numerous ways in which her uncle assisted her in each of these areas. Among the most touching of Wells’s recollections are Faulkner’s driving the children to and from school each day, his great joy in attending the annual Oxford horse shows, his hosting of both formal and informal parties at Rowan Oak, and his paying for Wells’s college education and a year in Europe (and directing her course of study as well). This is not the Faulkner who is a literary genius; this is a Faulkner who relishes the day-to-day activities of common, ordinary life with family, neighbors, horses, and dogs.

Wells’s book is chock full of Faulkner tidbits that will be new to Faulkner readers and scholars. There is previously untold information about Faulkner’s maternal line, the Butlers, including what may have become of the notorious Charlie Butler after he left Oxford. There is extensive treatment of the close relationship between the two brothers, William and Dean, very nearly inseparable, and all of the activities they shared together. There are

poignant characterizations of Maud Falkner and Estelle Oldham Faulkner, both presented here as more tender, loving individuals than we have previously thought them to be. There is revealing information about the lingering racism in the Faulkner family—and the extent to which Faulkner (and Wells) broke with family opinion on that matter. In the chapter “The Women Pappy Loved,” there is the revelation that one of those women was a next-door neighbor in Oxford. And there is a good deal of attention to the huge efforts expended by Faulkner to shield those he cared about from his personal demons (“I never saw William Faulkner drunk,” Wells writes).

Although Every Day by the Sun is not intended as a work of literary criticism, there is nevertheless an occasional revelation about Faulkner’s writings. We are told, for example, that many of the details from Dean Faulkner’s experiences as a pilot find their way into Pylon and that a painting of “Lo, the poor Indian” hung above the fireplace mantel in one room of Maud Falkner’s home—a far

Book Reviews and Notes by Faculty, Staff, Students, and Friends of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture

The Southern Register

Spring 2011

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Reading the South continued

Dean Faulkner Wells at home with her best friend more likely source for the title of Faulkner’s Indian story “Lo!” than the Alexander Pope quotation that is usually cited as the source.

While Wells’s relationship to Faulkner will undoubtedly garner most of the attention of reviews like this one, her book is not merely, or even primarily, about Faulkner.

Every Day by the Sun is an autobiography, and as such it tells the moving and powerful story of a survivor—and the love and support of family and community that make such survival possible. Never having known her father, who died four months before she was born and who, Faulkner once told her, was “a rainbow”; living for an extended period with an alcoholic and abusive stepfather; conflicted in her feelings toward her mother; and questing for personal identity in a time of rapid and often violent social change— these are the passages that Wells narrates, with graceful language and an excellent command of narrative flow. Even readers who care little for William Faulkner will find much to cherish in this book.

Robert W. Hamblin

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Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens.

Photographs by Vaughn Sills.

Foreword by Hilton Als. Introduction by Lowery Pei. 139 pages. 86 black-andwhite photographs. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. Cloth $29.95.

It seems fair to say that Vaughn Sills has an affinity for the South.

Though Canadian by birth and a longtime resident of New England, she has spent significant portions of her summers making pictures of people, places, and spaces in the South.

She has been doing this for more than 30 years now. In 2001 she published One Family, a first-rate visual study of a multigenerational extended family in rural Georgia. Ten years later, she offers us Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens. This book is not much like its predecessor—it doesn’t focus on a narrowly prescribed group

Spring 2011

of people or a single place—but it is full of valuable truths about life in the small-town and rural South, not only in terms of fact but also in terms of feeling and spirit.

Sills spent nearly 20 years making the pictures in Places for the Spirit.

Searching for the kinds of gardens she wanted to photograph (like gardening itself) did not lend itself to haste. There were, no doubt, hours and hours of slow, country-road driving and long afternoons poking around the back streets of some very small towns. Some days she didn’t find any gardens to photograph, and if she found two in a day she felt lucky. Given the result, however, it seems time well spent. Places for the Spirit offers some of those many hours back to its viewers/readers— as gifts of a sort that encourage us to travel along with the photographer and sit for a while in the living, breathing shade of some of the gardens she photographed.

These are not the kinds of formal gardens that tourists visit by the busload at some of the South’s grand estates. Instead, most of these gardens are on small lots and accompany modest homes. A few are neatly manicured, but most seem unrestrained, almost overfull of life.

Some include statuary, but the figures are more likely to be farm animals than cherubs or nymphets.

Many use old tires or commodes as planters and sea shells or bottles as borders. These gardens are not primarily for show; they are instead the gardener’s space, a place created for oneself and to be oneself in, as well as to share with friends, family, and whatever local spirits choose to make their home there.

According to the book’s introduction (written by Lowery Pei, Sills’s husband and sometimes driver as she searched for gardens to photograph), most of these gardens show a line of cultural descent from Africa.

Conceived in the intersection of African belief, the hard realities of

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Reading the South continued

University Press of MississiPPi

Panther Tract Wild Boar Hunting in the Mississippi Delta

By Melody Golding Introduction by Hank Burdine With recipes from Chef John Folse Photographs and tales that revel in the tradition-rich lore of dogs, horses, and hunters pursuing wild boar $40 hardback; $40 Ebook

Spirit of the Delta The Art of Carolyn Norris

By Dorothy Sample Shawhan With contributions from Patti Carr Black, Tom Rankin, and Kim Rushing A retrospective of an inspirational self-taught artist from the Mississippi Delta $35 hardback; $35 Ebook

enslavement, and a begrudged latter-day form of freedom, such gardens have been planted and nurtured by generations of African-descended people across the American South. While each is unique, there are qualities that many of them share. These include the reappropriation of things intended for other uses (tires, bottles, pipes), an abiding “relationship with the unseen” (wind chimes, objects and surfaces that reflect light), and an improvisatory aesthetic that conceives of the garden more as process than product. All of these qualities (and more) are evident in Sills’s photographs—not merely as documented facts but also as essential garden elements that interact with one another to create spiritual wholes.

One wonders if Sills often met with disappointment upon telling people that she was photographing her Southern garden project in black-and-white.

Gardens mean flowers for most of us, and flowers mean colors, usually bright colors. But for the gardens she shows us in Places for the Spirit, black-andwhite seems the perfect photographic choice. These gardens are more about light and shade, movement and form, space and place, than about color, and Sills’s mastery of the grayscale allows her to emphasize those qualities. The subtle grays of shaded greenery, as rendered by black-and-white film, let us sense the gardens’ cool. The brightness of direct sunlight can be reined in so we don’t feel the need to shade our eyes or squint. In short, Vaughn Sills’s photographs depict these “places for the spirit” beautifully. They make me want to sit myself down in one of them and not move for awhile.

Last Barriers Photographs of Wilderness in the Gulf Islands National Seashore

By Donald Muir Bradburn A stunning record of the pristine beauty of the islands shielding Mississippi’s Gulf Coast $40 hardback; $40 Ebook

I’m Feeling the Blues Right Now Blues Tourism and the Mississippi Delta

By Stephen A. King A critical look at the controversial strategies officials and promoters wield to “sell” the blues $55 printed casebinding; $55 Ebook

Faulkner and Whiteness Edited by Jay Watson An exploration of the Nobel Laureate’s work and its interrogations of whiteness $55 printed casebinding; $55 Ebook

www.upress.state.ms.us 800-737-7788

David Wharton

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Southern RegisterSpring2011.indd 1

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The NEW Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Sponsored by

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Southern Foodways Register The Newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance “He . . . served free chicken gumbo as bar owners often did back in the bayou country, never called the cops to settle a beef, kept hard-boiled eggs in big pickle jars on the bar, and made hot boudin that would break your heart.”

—James Lee Burke, The Neon Rain, 1987

Schedule of Events June 10–12 Big Apple BBQ Block Party New York City June 23–25 Cajun Country Field Trip New Orleans to Eunice, Louisiana SOLD OUT July 2–3 Camp Bacon at Zingerman’s Ann Arbor, Michigan

Joe York is busy traveling the South collecting stories on film for the forthcoming Southern Food: The Movie. His collection of shorts from South Carolina include Bertha’s, Goat, Bowen’s Island, Giving Thanks in Awendaw, Carolina Grist, and—a meditation on pastured pigs and tango dancing—Ride that Pig to Glory. We shared these films at two Potlikkers this spring, in Charleston and Greenville, South Carolina.

The latest and greatest from Joe, The Deadliest Throw, about the annual Interstate Mullet Toss at the Flora-Bama Lounge, debuted at the Florida Film Festival in April.

Think bikinis, folded fish, and fierce competition.

You can view these, and all of our films, on our Web site at www.southernfoodways.org.

Courtesy SFA

July 17–18 Stir the Pot at Poole’s Diner, featuring Ed Lee Raleigh, North Carolina

Southern Food: The Movie(s)

September 18–19 Stir the Pot at Poole’s Diner, featuring John Fleer Raleigh, North Carolina October 28–30 The Cultivated South: 14th Southern Foodways Symposium Oxford, Mississippi

Victor “Goat” Lafayette

November, TBD Stir the Pot at Poole’s Diner, featuring Linton Hopkins Raleigh, North Carolina

SFA Oral History Update

Simon Wilson

Meghan Leonard

The oral history initiative is as strong as Nell Knox ever with lots of projects in the hopper, a handful of colleagues out in the field, a new group of summer interns, and some exciting new collaborations.

We’ve initiated seven new oral history projects this year, which will result in approximately 100 new interviews to be added to our archive. In Louisiana, Sara Roahen is collecting interviews for four new projects: Down the Bayou, Ya-Ka-Mein, Sno-Balls, and Creole Lunch Houses in Acadiana, the last of which she’s collaborating on with Rien Fertel. The Carrboro, North Carolina, Farmers’ Market is one of our main subjects for this year’s Cultivated South theme and will be documented by Kate Medley, who will be interviewing market vendors, and graduate students Sara Camp Arnold (UNC–Chapel Hill) and Ashley Young (Duke), who are working to document the farm-to-restaurant connection in the Triangle area (as a result of this opportunity, Sara Camp is pursing this subject as her thesis subject). SFA oral historian Amy Evans Streeter is working with the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative’s (SRBWI’s) New Visions program to mentor high school girls in conducting fieldwork, collecting interviews with Mississippi Delta farmers in the SRBWI’s Women in Agriculture program. In addition to these new Rita Colavincenzo projects, we’ll also continue to add interviews

Amy Evans Streeter

Courtesy Claire Ackerman

to our online archive—namely, barbecue interviews from Georgia and North Carolina that are part of the Southern BBQ Trail.

Our work is being shared through new channels (Broadcastr, iTunes, YouTube), and Streeter is dedicating much of her time to mentoring students in the field of oral history (SFA interns, a spring oral history workshop at SFA headquarters, our collaboration with the SRBWI).

Our 2011 oral history interns are Nell Knox, Southern Studies graduate student from Jackson, Mississippi (In-House Intern); Claire Ackerman, graduate stuClaire Ackerman dent in Public History at Middle Tennessee State University (In-House Intern); and Rita Colavincenzo, graduate student in Folklore at Memorial University in Newfoundland, who will be documenting Southern cheese makers (Guided Intern).

We’re also excited to have a new version of our oral history brochure that’s hot off the presses, which we look forward to sharing at all of our upcoming events.

Thanks, as always, for your support!

SFA in Collaboration with the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative The SFA has embarked on a collaboration with the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative (SRBWI), a three-state initiative in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi that “promotes the first human rights agenda in the United States aimed at eradicating historical race, class, cultural, religious and gender barriers experienced by Southern rural black women.” One of the SRBWI’s outreach projects is its New Visions program, a formal effort to engage and involve young women in the work of SRBWI through teaching marketable skills in media technology and production.

In January, the SRBWI contacted SFA oral historian Amy Evans Streeter to inquire about oral history training for their New Visions students. That conversation led to the development of a project to document the farmers in the SRBWI’s Women in Agriculture Program, a branch of which is in the Mississippi Delta.

This spring, Streeter will meet with a group of Mississippi students who are part of the New Visions program to mentor them in the field of oral history and begin work on a project to collect interviews with farmers from the Mississippi Delta’s Women in Agriculture program—stories that we look forward to featuring as part of this year’s SFA programming theme, the Cultivated South.

We’ll keep you posted on this exciting collaboration. In the meantime, visit the SRBWI’s Web site for more information on the organization and its inspiring programs: www.srbwi.org.

For the Love of Okra

Brenda’s Dine-In and Take-Out of New Iberia, Louisiana as told to Sara Roahen by Brenda Placide, February 2011 Sara Roahen

My name is Brenda Placide, and I love to cook.

I have one brother, and he was working at Morton Salt. They were looking for some good plate lunches. So my brother asked me, he said, “Would you be interested in cooking for the guys at Morton Salt?”

Believe it or not, I started with about ten plate lunches, and it winded up to 50, and then it winded up to 100. Then the word got out that Miss Brenda was cooking.

But I was cooking out of my kitchen at home. It got so big, and I had no license. So people started reporting me to the Board of Health. I spoke to my mother and I said, “Mama, I think I’m going to open me a little restaurant.”

And these words she told me, she said, “Well, if you open up a restaurant for the love of money, you’re going to have a short haul. But if you open it up for the love of the food, you’re going to have a long haul.”

She was telling me the truth. I’ve been here 23 years by the blessing of God and my mother teaching me how to cook at a young age. Mostly my recipes come straight from my mother’s.

My mother worked in a lot of people’s kitchens cooking. When she had to go do housework or cooking, she would take me. So it just stayed with me. My mother’s name was Gustavia B. David. They used to call her Gussie or Tavia. My mother was from Parks, and then as a young girl she moved to New Iberia, and this is the only home I ever knew—New Iberia. The favorite thing my mother would make, that I loved so much back in the days, was smothered chicken, okra, and potato salad.

That was a Sunday dinner, smothered chicken.

I have a very small kitchen, but I’d say I turn out maybe about 70 or 80 plate lunches to 100 a day, out of that little bitty kitchen. I could sit about 25 people, but mostly my orders are to take out. They love my red beans and sausage. They love my fried chicken. And

Smothered okra is just a phone call away: Brenda Placide with her grandson, Typann.

one thing they love—you have to taste my bread pudding. My mother used to make that for us when we were young.

And it’s just old stale French bread.

When I get here in the morning I soak it in that Carnation milk, the canned milk. So you just soak it and let it get soft, and then you put your eggs in it, and then you put your sugar; a little vanilla, pineapple, whatever you want to put—bananas. People put raisins, different things in there, but my customers don’t like all that, so I just make it nice and plain for them. It comes with the lunch.

Today we have baked chicken, smothered pork chops, pork roast, baked spaghetti. They love the baked spaghettis.

And we have smothered okra. Now the okra, a lot of people don’t put up okra, but when okra season comes around— that’s in the summertime—I put up like 200 bushels of okra. I have an okra cutter. It’s a little cutter that cuts the okra up for you. It doesn’t take but a half an hour—maybe 20 minutes—to cut a bushel of okra. The frozen okra, it has too much slime. You can’t get that slime out. But I cut the okra, I precook

them in the oven, and then I vacuumseal them and put them in the freezer. I cook all the slime out of them before I vacuum-seal them.

My favorite thing to cook here would be my smothered cabbage. That’s awesome. You take that cabbage and you wash it. After you wash it, you put it in a colander and let it drain. And you drop your cabbage leaves in the pot with a little bit of grease. I use peanut oil when I cook. Then you drop your seasoning in it—my bell pepper, my celery, a little basil—and then you put your top on it and let it steam for about maybe a half an hour. Then you come back and put your salt meat or your ham on the top of your cabbage; cover it back and let it steam, and as it steams it’s going to be cooking down. And that’s why you call it smothered cabbage—not steamed.

You’re smothering it now. You don’t have to stir it. Put it on a medium fire.

And just let it smother with the top on it. And after you cook it, you put you a little sugar and a little garlic powder in it. You always put a little pinch of sugar in your cabbage.

A Philosophy of Boudin

Mowata Store, Mowata, Louisiana as told to Sara Roahen by Bubba Frey, August 2007 Bubba Frey

it: What do you think it needs? A little bit more pepper or salt or whatever, so everybody would give their input.

Here at the store, I’m making it almost identically to the way that my uncle was making it. Now, I don’t put the internal organs in it for the simple fact that that generation is all dead and gone now. The young kids today, if it doesn’t look like a chicken nugget or a French fry, they’re not going to eat it.

Now, if you tell somebody that you got kidneys and heart and liver in there, you know they ain’t going to touch that with a 10-foot pole. So I leave the internal organs out. And people come in and say, “it tastes just like the boudin my mama used to make.” In fact, I had

There was a Mr. Atterbury from around New York [who] came down before the Depression, and they bought up pretty much all the land around here. They had the corn farm, they had the cotton farm, and right around here it was called the rice farm. There was a severe drought at the time, and the community of Mowata didn’t have a name yet, so they were going to call it More Water. Southern Pacific Railroad is the one that would map out the spurs and stuff like that in the little towns, so they were in charge of bringing the sign. So all the dignitaries got together at the train depot the day that they were supposed to christen Mowata as More Water, and when they pulled the sign out of the boxcar, it was a misprint.

And it was printed M-o-w-a-t-a, like broken English. And that’s how it got its name.

one man come in here; he argued with me that I put too much liver, and I just had to tell him—you know the customer is always right, so I just had to tell him—“next time I’ll cut back a little bit on it.”

I have very little grease in mine. I don’t profess to have the best boudin in the world, but mine is the least greasy, I can tell you that. I don’t tell too many people what I do around this part of the country, because everywhere you look there’s a boudin shop. Right there in Eunice, there’s three or four major boudin operations. One of them went out of business—Johnson’s. They were the ones that started making boudin first in this part of the country. If you got boudin anywheres in the Eunice area, you got it at Johnson’s or you didn’t get it at all. And it was only on Saturday mornings, and I seen it over there to where if you drove at five o’clock in the morning, people were already lining up outside the door of his grocery store.

Now if you got there late on a Saturday morning, if you stood in line and didn’t get any boudin, the worst part was that you didn’t get any boudin. The best part was you knew what went on in Eunice the whole week before.

Sara Roahen

My name is Bubba Frey. I’ll be 51 my next birthday, and I haven’t ventured very far from Mowata.

I used to be a rice and crawfish farmer, and then around the early ’90s all my equipment that I had gotten from my grandfather and my daddy, it was obsolete. For me to stay in farming, I would have had to pick up probably 1,000 more acres and spend a bunch of money on equipment. And at the time, the store came up for sale over here. Back then it was still a little grocery store, and people still shopped there instead of going to the big Wal-Marts or WinnDixies. They were making a little bit of sausage here before, and boudin.

And then through the years, things were changing. Canned items, sometimes they were a year old; I had to take them home and use them myself or throw them away because they got too old. Home staples—groceries and stuff like that—just weren’t going to cut it in here. So through those years I started making sausage and the tasso, deboned stuffed chickens, bacon. I’ve started raising guinea [hens] and chickens. I will make 400 pounds of boudin in one given day.

I learned through my great-uncle Lawrence Frey. Every time he made boudin, I was there to help him. I would follow him everywhere he’d go. I knew that one day these people weren’t going to be around here anymore—it was going to be shoved underneath the table and forgotten forever. When we’d make boudin we’d grind it up, and they’d taste

Mark Your Calendars!

CONTRIBUTORS

March 22–24, 2012

Tobie Baker is a communications specialist for the Office of Media and Public Relations at the University of Mississippi. Formerly a newspaper reporter in Grenada, he received his BS in journalism from the University of Mississippi in 1996.

19th Oxford Conference for the Book www.oxfordconferenceforthebook.com

Mark Camarigg is the former assistant editor and current publications manager for Living Blues magazine.

Southern Foodways Alliance name company

Rebecca Lauck Cleary is a communications specialist in the Office of Media and Public Relations at the University of Mississippi. She received a BA in Journalism from the University in 1997.

Molly Dyal received a BA from the University of

address Mississippi in May 2011 with a double major in journalcity

M E M B E R S H I P Please make checks payable to the Southern Foodways Alliance and mail them to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture University, MS 38677.

ism and Spanish. She is from Austin, Texas. state

zip

Robert W. Hamblin, Southeast Missouri State telephoneUniversity, is professor of English fax and director of the Center for Faulkner Studies and author and coeditor e-mail of 21 volumes, including four volumes of Faulkner’s Warner Bros. screenplays, Faulkner and Hollywood: A ❏ $50 student ❏ $75 individual ❏ $100 family Retrospective from the Brodsky Collection, and A Critical ❏ $200 nonprofit institution ❏ $500 Reference corporation Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary to His Life and Work.

Donald M. Kartiganer is Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies Emeritus at the University of Mississippi and director of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE: www.southernfoodways.org or call Julie Pickett at 662.915.5993 or via e-mail at sfadesk@olemiss.edu

name__________________________________________________ company________________________________________________

Panny Flautt Mayfield, an award-winning photographer and journalist, is director of public relations at Coahoma Community College in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

address_________________________________________________

Ted Ownby, director of the Center, holds a joint appointment in Southern Studies and history.

city______________________________state______ zip___________

Cathryn Stout is a journalist and a 2011 graduate of the Southern Studies master’s program who begins pursuing her doctorate in American Studies at Saint Louis University in the fall of 2011.

telephone_______________________________________________ fax____________________________________________________ e-mail__________________________________________________ o $50 student

o $75 individual

o $200 nonprofit institution

Mary McKenzie Thompson is a retired high school teacher of English and creative writing from Clarksdale, Mississippi.

o $100 family

o $500 corporation

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, VISIT US AT OUR WEB SITE:

www.southernfoodways.com or call Julie Picket at 662.915.5993 or via e-mail at sfadesk@olemiss.edu The Southern Register

Jimmy Thomas is managing editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. An alumnus of the University of Mississippi, he has worked for publications in Oxford and New York.

David Wharton is assistant professor and director of documentary projects at the Center, where he teaches courses in Southern Studies, fieldwork, and photography. He is the author of The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade.

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2011 Mississippi Delta Literary Tour Photography by Jimmy Thomas

(above) Each year, Mary Dayle McCormick leads the tour to the gravesite of author William Alexander Percy in the Greenville Cemetery and reads from Percy’s seminal work Lanterns on the Levee. Here the tour group poses for a photo at the Percy family plot where William Alexander and his statesman father, LeRoy, are buried. The bronze statue, The Patriot, memorializes LeRoy Percy. (left) Shirley Williams, Carolyn Graetz, and Kerry Mooney at the grave of the iconic bluesman Robert Johnson, who was born 100 years ago this May. The gravesite is at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church near Money, Mississippi.

Dee and Janet Canale in line for a buffet Southern lunch of fried chicken, greens, fried green tomatoes, candied sweet potatoes, cornbread, peach cobbler, and sweet tea at Club Ebony in Indianola after a visit to the B. B. King Museum and Interpretive Center.

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Jamie Kornegay (center), proprietor of Turnrow Book Company in Greenwood, with tour attendees Phillip Gordon and Philippa Newfield. Each year Turnrow hosts the opening sessions of the Delta Tour with readings and talks with writers.

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Bluesman Sean Appel performs for the group at Po’ Monkey’s juke joint on the last night of the tour.

Touring Mama’s Dream World, Ethel Wright Mohammad Stitchery Museum in Belzoni.

At Turnrow, Curtis Wilkie (center), author and journalism professor at the University of Mississippi, was joined by Jim Abbott, former editor of the Indianola Enterprise-Tocsin, and Tim Kalich, editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth, to discuss Wilkie’s new book, The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer. Yazoo City native and author Teresa Nicholas joined the tour at Turnrow to read from her new book, Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest. Afterwards, architectural historian and author Mary Carol Miller gave a walking tour of downtown Greenwood, starting on the banks of the Yazoo River.

Roberta, Carey, and Bill Sheriff (from left) in front of the Mississippi Blues Trail marker that commemorates Club Ebony.

(above) Actors Alice Walker and Johnny McPhail perform a “porch play” in Clarksdale from the works of Tennessee Williams. Monologue selections for the production came from Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Walker in the role of Maggie and McPhail in the role of Big Daddy. (left) Kenneth Holditch, literary scholar, professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, and author of Tennessee Williams and the South, lectures on Tom “Tennessee” Williams and the effects of his childhood in Clarksdale on his writing.

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18th Oxford Conference for the Book Portfolio Photography by Doug McLain The 18th Oxford Conference for the Book, a program of readings, talks, and panels on March 24–26, 2011, was a great success from its beginning at the J. D. Williams Library with lunch and Peggy Whitman Prenshaw’s keynote address on Southern women and autobiography, through the final event at Off Square Books, where participants gathered for a marathon book signing and celebrated Tennessee Williams’s 100th birthday with toasts and a big cake.

The 2011 conference was sponsored by the University of Mississippi, Junior Auxiliary of Oxford, Lafayette County & Oxford Public Library, Lafayette County Literacy Council, and Square Books and partially funded by a contribution from the R&B Feder Foundation for the Beaux Arts and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and the Oxford Tourism Council.

Poets R. T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah at Washington and Lee University, and Sarah Kennedy, of Mary Baldwyn College, during their “Reading in the Post-Gutenbergian Age” panel with artist and arts commentator William Dunlap and Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

Claiborne Barksdale of the Barksdale Reading Institute, Young Authors Fair novelists Pam Voelkel, Jon Voelkel, Ally Condie, and moderator Elaine Scott discuss readers and reading during the “Endangered Species” panel. The Voelkels also spoke to more than 900 fifth graders who received personal copies of Middleworld, the first of their Jaguar Stones trilogy. Condie met with nearly 800 ninth graders, who had received copies of her novel Matched.

Téa Obreht signs her newly published debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, for Justin Taylor, author of a new debut novel, The Gospel of Anarchy.

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(right) Michael McFee, in a session with poets Beth Ann Fennelly and Richard Tillinghast, presented readings in celebration of National Poetry Month. McFee also gave a Poetry Craft Talk at the Lafayette County & Oxford Public Library, and Tillinghast conducted a poetry workshop on the University campus.

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From left: Waiting for a reading session are fiction writers Kevin Brockmeier, author of seven books, most recently The Illumination; Karen Russell, author of a story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and a novel, Swamplandia!; and Tom Franklin, a teacher in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program and recipient of the 2010 Los Angeles Book Award for his novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

(above) Pulitizer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey read from her latest book, Beyond Katrina, a personal portrait of her home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and her family’s struggle to recover from the hurricane’s devastation. (left) From left: Curtis Wilkie, whose most recent book is The Fall of the House of Zeus: The Rise and Ruin of America’s Most Powerful Trial Lawyer, and W. Ralph Eubanks, director of publishing at the Library of Congress and author of two books on the history of his Mississippi family, discuss narrative nonfiction in a session moderated by Jamie Kornegay, owner of Turnrow Book Company in Greenwood, Mississippi.

“Comic Book Auteurs”—the first-ever session on graphic books presented at the conference—featured (from left) Joe Matt (Peepshow, The Poor Bastard, Fair Weather, Spent), Jack Pendarvis, author and creative writing teacher at the University of Mississippi, Joyce Farmer (Special Exits), and Michael Kupperman (Snake ’n’ Bacon’s Carton Cabaret, Tales Designed to Thrizzle).

Norman W. Jones (center), coeditor, with Hannibal Hamlin, of the The King James Bible after 400 Years, joined Charles Reagan Wilson (left) and Ted Ownby, cultural historians who have written extensively on religion in the South, for a discussion of the KJB’s significance and cultural influence over the last four centuries.

(right) Square Books founder and owner Richard Howorth (right) discussed the history of San Francisco’s famous City Lights bookstore with Paul Yamazaki, who began his career there packing books in 1970 and now heads the store’s bookbuying program.

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Cartoonist Joyce Farmer Speaks at Conference and on Caregiver Panel Joyce Farmer’s graphic memoir, Special Exits, portrays the real-life demands and joys of caring for aging parents.

The drawings, begun in the late 1990s, were painstakingly created over a series of years because of the author’s macular degeneration. Farmer was an invited panelist for the Oxford Conference for the Book, but graciously came early to participate in a session, “A Caregiver’s Journey,” with panelists Errol Castens, Norman Easterbrook, and Lydia Jones organized by Jo Ann O’Quin, professor of social work at the University of Mississippi.

Farmer’s story and the caregiver panel provided an educational experience for students, community caregivers, and older assisted living residents. A book signing and reception afforded a unique time for students and caregivers to visit individually with this artist, who, at age 72, has been interviewed in national media like the New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post. Special Exits will have a French translation and is one of three in contention for the Reuben Award for Best Graphic Novel from the National Cartoonist Society.

Joyce Farmer (left) with Amanda Victory and Lott Warren at the reception

Amanda Victory

From left: Panelists Norman Easterbrook, Lydia Jones, and Errol Castens, who have parents at Azaleas Assisted Living Community in Oxford, talk to artist Joyce Farmer and program organizer Jo Ann O’Quin.

Joyce Farmer’s book jacket is recreated on a cake for her reception

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An avid traveler, Farmer admitted to never visiting the South although says that she has subsequently become the local expert in her hometown of Laguna Beach on Mississippi and Southern hospitality. “It was a true joy to have Joyce Farmer visit and reveal more of

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her heartfelt and poignant life experiences,” O’Quin said. “I recommend this book to all who have parents, who are or have been or will be caregivers, and all who are fascinated by the comic book style.”

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“Texts and Technologies” Panel at 2011 Oxford Conference for the Book In the late 1980s, while doing research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., I got into a conversation with one of the librarians. I commented on the labor involved in the creation and upkeep of the library’s massive catalogue. She agreed wholeheartedly but then, enhanced by a hand gesture that took in all corners of the library, said that all of it would some day be available in electronic form. I had no idea what she meant.

Indeed, back then, when we thought of archival work done by scholars of Medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, we might picture men and women who had traveled great distances to sit at the reading room tables of the world’s research libraries, arched over mouse-eaten records with a magnifying glass in one hand and a pencil in the other, painstakingly deciphering faded lettering and recording their findings on notepads. But things have changed—dramatically.

Astonishing advances in imaging technology and internet capability have transformed the jealously guarded reading rooms in the world’s great libraries into a new worldwide reading room called “the digital humanities.”

The purpose of this relatively new undertaking is not only the preservation and broad dissemination of rare and hard-to-obtain texts but the enhancement of our understanding of them by integrating them into a multimedia and metadata platform that creates an open and truly dynamic environment.

A panel on “Texts and Technologies,” which was a part of this year’s Oxford Conference for the Book, offered evidence of the variety of influences this exciting trend has on the humanities. Gregory Heyworth, professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at the University of Mississippi, aided by four Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College students, offered a progress report on the recovery work they are doing on manuscripts in

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Jennifer Drouin Mary Hayes

the Kate Skipwith Papers and the Wynn-Faulkner Collection, housed in the University Library’s Special Collections.

The Skipwith collection contains letters dating back all the way to the Revolutionary War, while the Wynn-Faulkner Collection contains papers and unpublished poems by William Faulkner found in the attic of Faulkner’s friend Phil Stone. Students Danielle Thornton (English), Marie Wicks (International Studies), Devon Emig (German and Linguistics), and Steven Stringer (English) showed visual examples of how a newly devel-

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oped high-power, multispectral digital imaging can recover writings and watermarks on manuscript pages that are invisible to other technologies as well as to the naked eye. The Skipwith team, for instance, demonstrated how they were able to clarify the watermark on a letter from George Washington to General Nathanael Greene of the Continental Army. The team took several shots using transmissive light, illuminating the letter from below by setting it on an LED laptop screen set first to red, then green, then blue, and finally white. They then integrated the shots to reveal the watermark far more clearly than before. The watermark offers clear clues as to the origin of the paper and helps us understand the history of paper production and commercial traffic at the time.

Coming at the digital humanities enterprise from a different angle, Professor Jennifer Drouin of the University of Alabama talked about a new kind of Web site she is creating. The site, called Shakespeare au/in Québec, will be an online anthology of adaptations of Shakespeare plays written in Québec since the 1960s. All but a couple of the play texts will be in French. The site itself, however, will be bilingual. Drouin comes to this massive undertaking with prior experience. She spent three years as the digital humanities postdoctoral fellow for the “Making Publics” project in Canada. In addition to the more than 30 adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, the site will contain a searchable database listing information about each play’s theater history and production details, as well as multimedia image, audio, and video files when available.

Drouin also adds interviews with the playwrights, a bibliography of secondary sources on these plays (including production reviews), academic essays providing critical analyses of the playtexts, and a section on the history of Québec, and its political and literary context.

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Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration Donates Files

Ivo Kamps

Gregory Heyworth Examining yet another dimension of technological change, Mary Hayes, Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Mississippi, gave a presentation on the impact of “Short Message Service” (SMS) technology on classic texts such as the Bible. SMS, a widely used mode communication used by some 2.4 billion people worldwide, is defined on Wikipedia as “the text communication service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices.”

This new language, Hayes reports, was used in 2005 to translate the Bible into “text message speak.” The results are as startling as they are entertaining. The opening lines from Genesis becomes “In da Bginnin God cread da heavens & da earth.” The first verse of John 4:19 becomes “We luv coz God luvd us 1st.”

Psalm 23 is rendered as “U, Lord, r my shepherd. I will neva be in need. U let me rest in fields of green grass. U lead me 2 streams of peaceful water.”

Given that SMS is predominantly the purview of young people, we may wonder how, at the time we are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the immensely influential King James Bible, this new SMS “translation” of the Bible will shape future uses and understandings of scripture. Hayes speculates that SMS, just as the vernacular translations of the Bible in the early modern period had a democratizing effect on the Christian religion, is engaging a large and entirely new readership.

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Hayes believes that this “text message translation shows the versatility . . . of the English language and suggests that it is not a passing fad.”

Back in the 1980s, the librarian at the Folger obviously could not possibly have foreseen today’s state of affairs with any precision, but it is clear that she had an inkling of what was to come. Web sites such as the massive Early English Books Online database (housing every text printed in English between the years 1400 and 1700), Patricia Fumerton’s English Broadside Ballad Archive (the subject of her recent Savage Lecture on the Ole Miss campus), Jennifer Drouin’s Web site, and numerous other projects that are on the way, are transforming the way we do research. As a graduate student in the late 1980s, I traveled from Princeton, New Jersey, to Washington, D.C., on a weekly basis to do the work required for my dissertation. Today, virtually any text that had to be retrieved for me from the Folger’s underground vault of textual treasures is available to any student from any computer anywhere in the world. What is more, our students are not merely the ones who consult the archive for their research, they, with the help of Professor Heyworth, are actively contributing to the expansion and shaping of the archive.

Ivo Kamps

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History went digital in the summer of 2010 when Christina Arflack spent 10 weeks recording clippings, photographs, and printed materials in dozens of scrapbooks belonging to the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration. “She captured 21 years of the conference’s story,” said Carolyn Vance Smith of Copiah-Lincoln Community College, who founded the NLCC in 1990 and serves as cochairman. The original materials were donated to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in the fall of 2010, along with digital recordings.

“We kept digital recordings in Natchez, too,” Smith said. “We also kept photocopies of certain materials and copies of printed materials. I refer to the files a lot when developing new conferences. They are invaluable.”

The project, funded by a grant from the National Park Service, had long been a dream, Smith said.

Arflack, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Memphis, recorded scrapbook pages in chronological order. She then placed original papers into acid-free sleeves, and all sleeves into acid-free boxes. The whole set of several dozen boxes was handed over to MDAH staffers in November 2010. “We’re delighted that the collection is now permanently safe and will soon be available for researchers,” Smith said.

The NLCC is cosponsored by Co-Lin, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Natchez National Historical Park, and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Cochairmen with Smith are Jim Barnett of MDAH, Kathleen Jenkins of NNHP, and Ryanne Duffie Saucier of MPB. The 23rd annual NLCC is set for February 23–26, 2012, on the theme “Legends, Lore, and Literature: Storytelling in the South.” Information is available at www.colin.edu/nlcc or by calling 866-296-NLCC. The Southern Register

Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Announces Winners The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters (MIAL) has announced its award winners for works first published, shown, or performed in the year 2010. The award categories are poetry, fiction, nonfiction, visual arts, photography, music composition (popular/contemporary), and music composition (classical/concert). Award winners, who must have significant ties to the state of Mississippi and have been nominated by an MIAL member, are selected in a juried competition by out-of-state judges.

Presentation of the awards will be made at the Institute’s annual Awards Gala on June 4, 2011, at the Ocean Springs Community Center in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Mistress of Ceremonies will be Mary Anderson Pickard.

An MIAL Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the discretion of the Board of Governors, will be presented this year to Indianola native Mary D. Garrard, Professor of Art History Emerita at American University in Washington, D.C. Garrard holds degrees from Newcomb College, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University. Her 1989 book, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, is widely acknowledged as a major contribution to the history of art. With Norma Broude, Garrard has coedited or contributed to several books of scholarship that have become texts in art history and women’s studies courses. She has recently published Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. Garrard has lectured extensively on Renaissance art, feminist art, and feminist issues at universities and museums across the country and was the second national president of Women’s Caucus for Art. The winner of the poetry award for 2010 is Ava Leavell Haymon of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for her book of poetry entitled Why the House is Made of Gingerbread. This book takes the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel and uses the elements of the tale in a collection of poems both disturbing and humorous.

Haymon is also the author of two othThe Southern Register

er books of poetry, five chapbooks, and seven plays for children. She was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and lived in Newton during her youth.

The award for nonfiction goes to Natasha Trethewey, professor of English and Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. A

Gulfport native, Trethewey wins for her book of creative nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

In this book she reflects on her life on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and her family’s efforts to rebuild their lives after Hurricane Katrina.

Trethewey is the author of three volumes of poetry and won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard. She has previously won the MIAL poetry award and in 2008 was chosen Georgia Woman of the Year.

Born in Meridian, Brad Watson, professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Wyoming, is the 2010 winner in the fiction category for Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, a collection of stories that capture the strangeness of the human experience. Watson has worked as a journalist, teacher, and writer of fiction; his work The Heaven of Mercury: A Novel was a finalist for the National Book Award.

In the visual arts category, Rolland

In Memoriam

Gwendolyn McGee 1943–April 27, 2011 The Board of Governors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters notes with deep sadness the death of longtime board member Gwendolyn McGee of Jackson, Mississippi. Her experience as a working artist, her good judgment, her infectious enthusiasm, and her willingness to work hard on a variety of committees made her an invaluable member of this board. A winner of the 2003 MIAL award for visual arts, Gwen also received the 2011 Governor’s Award for Excellence. She stitched African American history and life into her stunning quilts just as she stitched joy and integrity into her life. She will be sorely missed.

Spring 2011

Page 31

Golden wins for his River and Reverie—Paintings of the Mississippi River, first exhibited at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson.These paintings were designed to show the beauty, power, fear, and majesty of the Mississippi River.

Golden’s works may be found in numerous private and corporate collections and in museums ranging from the New Orleans Museum of Art to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

He has had over 100 one-man shows and has won numerous awards for his paintings.

Oraien Catledge, born in Sumner, is the photography winner for 2010 for his book entitled Oraien Catledge: Photographs.

Catledge came to a career in photography near the end of a long career as a social worker. While he is principally a photographer of people, his black-and-white works also capture the landscapes and the city scenes of New Orleans and Mississippi. He is also known for his photographic chronicle of the lives of the working-class inhabitants of the Cabbagetown neighborhood in Atlanta.

The winner of music composition (popular/contemporary) is Eden Brent of Greenville for her work Ain’t Got No Troubles. An apprentice for 16 years of blues pioneer Boogaloo Ames, Brent was named the 2010 Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year. In 2009 she won both the Acoustic Album of the Year and Acoustic Artist of the Year at the Blues Music Awards. With appearances across the country and the world, Brent has been lauded by critics as “Bessie Smith meets Diana Krall meets Janis Joplin.”

This year the Institute recognizes two winners in music composition (classical/concert): James Sclater and Samuel Jones. Sclater wins for Concerto for Piano and Wind Ensemble.

He retired in 2010 after a 40-year career as professor of Music Theory and Composition at Mississippi College in Clinton.

The winner of awards from MIAL on six different occasions, he has also won the Ostwald Award for New Band Music.

Among his notable works are Concerto for Orchestra, composed for the 80th birthday of Eudora Welty, and Witness to Matters Human and Divine, based on works by James Agee.

Sclater holds the Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Texas.

Samuel Jones, a native of Inverness, Mississippi, is the Composer in Residence of the Seattle Symphony and wins for his Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra. A graduate of Millsaps College, he holds MA and PhD degrees from the Eastman School of Music. He has won three prior awards from MIAL and also the Ford Foundation Recording/Publication Award.

Jones is a past president of the Conductors’ Guild and was the founding dean of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.

He is also a Master Teacher at the Conductors Institute.

Each winner in the juried categories will receive a cash prize of $1,000 and a Mississippi-made gift. Past winners have included Richard Ford, Walker Percy, Barry Hannah, Gwendolyn McGee, and William Eggleston.

Bridget Pieschel of Columbus serves as president of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Jan Taylor of Jackson is treasurer, and Margaret Anne Robbins of Pontotoc is secretary. For more information about attending the Awards Gala on June 4, 2011, visit the Web site at www.ms-arts-letters.org.

Mary McKenzie Thompson Page 32

continued from 2

Director’s Column

(6) Documentary work that includes everybody, without much concern about whether the subject is either uniquely or identifiably Southern. The current teaching of—and student facility for—multiple media has been one of the most dramatic changes in student accomplishment and teaching methods.

In documentary classes, blues scholarship, and foodways projects, the Center continues to think about, encourage, and do new forms of documentary work.

(7) Cultural theory approaches have redefined and deconstructed all sorts of topics through critical race theory, gender theory, trauma theory, sexuality studies, place theory, environmental studies, performance theory, and the like. Sometimes theorizing leads back to issues of earlier issues of identity, often by discussing a range of identities and studying who forms those identities, how, and why.

(8) Global South perspectives have encouraged both a broad perspective on the South as part of international movement of people, ideas, and influences and a new set of questions outside a dichotomy of North-South comparisons.

(9) The Center has always encouraged discussion of the contemporary South, but some recent efforts have emphasized the urban South, the multiethnic South, the tourism industry, new Southern literatures, the online South, and more.

All of these are part of Southern Studies, and my impression is that Southern Studies benefits from not throwing out all older approaches while trying to keep up with and help define the newest approaches.

Southern Studies keeps up some clear continuities with past efforts in part by studying cultural traditions, and identity, and distinctiveness through a combination of newer and older approaches.

In the present as in the past, the Center studies how people express themselves, especially through literature, music, and religion, and in the last few years it has added foodways as an essential component. It continues to study the complex intersections among the various forces within the South, and it uses an array of older and newer methods to continue its concentrate on race.

And it adapts. As we welcome our new colleagues, we look forward to the new questions and approaches they will bring.

The clearest way to continue the best work from the Center’s past is to encourage things we’ve never tried before.

Ted Ownby

HOT OFF THE PRESS! The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Volume 17, Education Clarence L. Mohr, editor.

HB117.....$45.00 Friends.....$40.50 PB117.....$22.95 Friends.....$22.46 For project details and ordering information, see page 18.

Spring 2011

The Southern Register

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Focus of Clarksdale’s 19th Tennessee Williams Festival

The Southern Register

Collection of Richard Freeman Leavitt

The 19th annual Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival honoring America’s great playwright will be held October 14–15, 2011, in Clarksdale and will be a continuation of the successful hometown celebration of his 100th birthday on March 26. Punctuating the festival’s mission to acquaint Mississippians of all ages with his works and the Mississippi Delta’s cultural heritage that influenced his writings, the focus this fall will be on his second Pulitzer Prize– winning play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Veteran Canadian theater professional Eda Holmes, who is directing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Shaw Festival during its 50th season in Ontario, will talk about her experiences directing the classic drama, the impact of visiting the Mississippi Delta in January 2011 in preparation for the play, and the influence of Williams on her own career. Accompanying her will be two Canadian actors to perform scenes from Cat. Holmes also will address students competing in the festival’s Student Acting Contest.

Making his first trip to Clarksdale, acclaimed speaker/writer/actor Jeremy Lawrence will share his thoughts about the influences of Williams and talk about his own theatrical career and the Broadway stage. Williams friend and scholar W. Kenneth Holditch will present the keynote address titled “Games People Play: Croquet, Football, and Mendacity in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Colby Kullman, recipient of the 2011 Mississippi Humanities Scholar of the Year Award, will moderate a panel of scholars discussing Cat and other Delta plays. Participating will be Coop Cooper, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Dorothy Shawhan, and Ralph Voss.

Live drama and readings from Williams plays will be performed by Canadian actors, director/actor Erma Duricko, Johnny McPhail, Alice Walker, Jeff Glickman, and Sherrye Williams. A reception honoring participating artists and scholars will be held in the historic Clark House, family home of Blanche Clark Cutrer.

Saturday morning’s Student Drama Competition will include monologue and scene competitions, Stella shouting contests, and acting workshops coordinated by Erma Duricko and Eda Holmes.

Jay Westerfaul will present an organ concert at St. George’s Episcopal Church at 2:00 p.m. followed by tours of the former rectory that is being renovated with Tennessee Williams memorabilia.

Porch plays featuring scenes from Williams plays will be presented in the historic district: 415 Court Street, 203 Court

Tennessee Williams

Street, 235 Clark Street, and 91 John Street. Performing will be Johnny McPhail, Alice Walker, Jeff Glickman, Sherrye Williams, Glynda Duncan, and students drama competition winners.

The finale kicks off with a barbecue supper followed by the presentations of competition winners, commentary from professional actors, and dancing to the Eddie Lee Coleman Blues Band.

Festival updates will be posted on the Web site www.coahomacc.edu/twilliams. All events are free and open to the public. However, reservations are required for the Friday luncheon, the Friday night reception, and Saturday’s barbecue supper. For additional information, call 662-621-4157.

Produced by Coahoma Community College, the festival is sponsored in part by grants from CCC, the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, the Rock River Foundation, local businesses, and patrons.

Spring 2011

Page 33

Southern Culture Catalog Civil Rights in the Delta

Photo Courtesy Memphis Commercial Appeal

Journalist Curtis Wilkie in conversation with Patti Carr Black, Emmett Till’s cousin Wheeler Parker, Sumner residents Frank Mitchener and Betty and Bill Pearson, Henry Outlaw of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University, and former Mississippi governor William F. Winter.

March 29, 2006.

Color, 60 minutes.

DVD1148 . . . . . . $20.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $18.00

Scene at courthouse in Sumner in 1955 during the Emmett Till murder trial

“Are You Walkin’ with Me?” Sister Thea Bowman, William Faulkner, and African American Culture Overview of programs Sister Thea presented at the annual Faulkner Conference from 1980 through 1989.

Produced by Lisa N. Howorth, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 1990.

Color, 30 minutes.

DVD 1016 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . $22.50 The Eleventh Oxford Conference for the Book Poster (2001) Poster features Richard Wright photograph by Carl Van Vetchen.

M9903 . . . . . . . . . . $10.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . . $ 9.00 The Dain & Cofield Collection Posters High quality 18" x 24" duotone posters featuring timeless photographs of William Faulkner Dain Poster M1034 . . . $18.95

Faulkner’s Mississippi: Land into Legend Transforms the fiction of William Faulkner’s mythical Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha into the reality of Oxford and Lafayette County, Mississippi, with quotations from Faulkner’s writings correlated with appropriate scenes. The first motion pictures inside Faulkner’s home are presented along with rare still photographs of the writer. Narrated by Joseph Cotton. Script by Evans Harrington. Producer, Robert D. Oesterling, University of Mississippi Center for Public Service and Continuing Studies. 1965.

Color, 32 minutes.

DVD1069 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . . $22.50 William Faulkner Stamp Ceremony A 22-cent Literary Arts Commemorative stamp honoring William Faulkner was issued by the United States Postal Service during a ceremony at the University of Mississippi on August 3, 1987. The DVD of this program includes remarks by author Eudora Welty, Faulkner’s daughter, Jill Faulkner Summers, and others.

Color, 34 minutes.

DVD1231 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . $22.50 William Faulkner and Eudora Welty This film features Eudora Welty at the opening session of the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.

Welty reads from her story “Why I Live at the P.O.” and answers questions about her work and Faulkner’s.

Color, 34 minutes.

DVD1104 . . . . . . $25.00 Friends . . . . . . . . $22.50

Cofield Poster M1033 . $18.95 Faulkner’s World Exhibit Poster M1789 . . . . . . . . . . . . . $10.00

Page 34

Spring 2011

The Southern Register

Books

All New, Limited Number of Copies Available The South: A Treasury of Art and Literature This richly illustrated volume includes wellselected texts and images from more than 300 years of life in the American South.

Edited—and signed—by Lisa Howorth.

384 pages; 120 color, 100 black-and-white illustrations. Only a few copies of this 1983 publication are left. Cloth.

B1006............. $150.00 Friends.....$135.00

Southern Culture Catalog

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Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Proceedings Studies in English, Volume 14 1974 conference papers by Malcolm Cowley, Elizabeth M. Kerr, and David Sansing along with transcripts of discussions by Joseph Blotner, Evans Harrington, and others. Paper.

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Studies in English, Volume 15 1975 conference papers by Cleanth Brooks, William Boozer, Carvel Collins, Blyden Jackson, Richard Godden, and Elizabeth M. Kerr along with transcripts of discussions by Victoria Black, Christine Drake, Howard Duvall, Robert J. Farley, Lucy Howorth, Mary McClain, Phil Mullen, William McNeil Reed, Dean Faulkner Wells, and others. Paper.

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The Maker and the Myth 1977 conference papers by Calvin S. Brown, Albert J. Guerard, Louis P. Simpson, Ilse Dusoir Lind, and Margaret Walker Alexander.

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Faulkner, Modernism, and Film 1978 conference papers by Malcolm Cowley, Hugh Kenner, Thomas Daniel Young, Horton Foote, Ilse Dusoir Lind, and Bruce Kawin.

Paper B1026..... $15.00 Friends.......$13.50 Cloth B1027..... $30.00 Friends.......$27.00 Fifty Years of Yoknapatawpha 1979 conference papers by Joseph Blotner, Michael Millgate, John Pilkington, Merle Wallace Keiser, James G. Watson, Noel Polk, and Thomas L. McHaney.

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